Welcome to this edition of the news chapter where we as usual blend solid facts with plausible rumours from our scene. This chapter was finalized at Gubbdata 2016 which was held this weekend, so much of the news are super-fresh! So, let's get crackin'!

After a detour on the Amiga and Atari ST scenes, Axis is back on the C64. However, they lost Devia, Zed Yago and also Slide (who has barely been a member for a year) to inactivity.

Release-wise not much has made it out from Arsenic this year. On the first day of the year they released the nice onefiler A Storm Is Coming together with Censor and Oxyron. Then came another onefiler, The Evil 40, released at Spinx Evil 40 meeting, celebrating her birthday. In the end of March they released the Arsenic BBQ 4.02final partyscroller, we take the liberty of assuming that the posse were drunk while creating this one.

The Atlantis+F4CG coop is steadily moving along, although in a bit of a slower pace than last year. Especially the number of cracks have been fewer so far in 2016. Either way, they started the year with a nice version of Jump Ninja, trained and PAL fixed by Dr. Science. Next up, in the beginning of April, was Platman, a game from the RGCD Cartridge Game Development Competition. A few days later came the much anticipated Eye of the Gods from Psytronik Software, supplied by Dr.Strange and trained by Dr.Science and Tsurugi.

On the legal side no less than two nice demos were released by the coop. From Berlin to Paris and Back ended up on fourth place at BCC Party #10 in the end of February. Two months later and we were treated with We Miss You, released at Buenzli Reboot Party 2.0 which hosted no competition, but that didn't stop Atlantis+F4CG from gracing the event.

In addition to this, Mario64 (who joined F4CG and the coop in the beginning of the year as a musician) and Ald put out some tunes, and one new crackintro by Tsurugi was introduced.

F4CG might be looking for more members, so if you think you got what it takes, contact Ze Smasher...

Booze Design took home the 2015 REU Compo with their contribution Treu Love, released on the very last day of 2015. Some parts in the initial release bugged on real 1750 REU's, but this was remedied in a subsequent release. In the process, it was discovered that REU emulation in Vice is not yet 100% accurate. A worthy victory nonetheless!

JackAsser hosted a pre-gubbdata BBQ for some selected sceners, including Dane, HCL, ruk, iopop, Pernod, Pex, Raveguru, Bj0rn Rostoen, Perplex and Archmage. A whole lot of coding, beer drinking and meat eating was going on at the event, according to one of the participants. Note that even Raveguru was present, back in Sweden from his stay abroad, at least for a little while.

They took home the silver medal with a demo named Classics at the Gubbdata 2016 competition. Just as TRIAD, also Booze worked on their demo at the party to do the final touches. HCL, Jackasser, Ruk, RaveGuru and Dane were all seen present at the event.

No changes in memberstatus, but Ruk bought a puppy and is repainting his house, so his coding has been suffering a bit lately.

As stated before in this chapter, Censor released the onefiler A Storm Is Coming together with Arsenic and Oxyron about 7 months ago. At Gubbdata 2016, Magnar scored third place in the music compo with his tune 2 Days. Also Mogwai was present at the party, as was Joe who came in on fourth place with one of his two compo-pictures.

Also, their HQ on the web, censordesign.com, is down. The domain name is still registered, so their retired member Sensei didn't forget to pay the registrar bill at least...

Crest is a group consisting of amazing talents - only problem is they don't seem to be doing anything anymore! Again, Rekool is the only member showing his worth, scoring third place at the Forever 2016 graphics competition with a piece named Loki.

Sadly, we must remove Crest from their steady spot in this news chapter, like we already did with Wrath Design. So, unless activity rises (which we hope), this is the last time you'll see the Crest logo in this chapter.

Since their latest demo Shareware was released at Zoo 2015, it has again been awfully quiet from Dekadence. However, Britelite reveals that they are preparing for 2017, which is the 20th anniversary of Dekadence. So, they are working on stuff behind the scenes, and there will be C64 releases coming out during the next year!

Nimbus started out 2016 for Excess with Vault Man 2 preview, followed by their version of Ring on a String. Next up was Uni-Games preview handled by Stormfront, after which Nimbus gave us the trained first release of the rather entertaining 4-player game Shotgun.

Shotgun sported an old but previously unseen Excess intro by Spinball. It was found when Stormfront went through H-Bloxx disk stash, which he received from him last Christmas.

As their 25th anniversary is coming up in October, Excess might compile a collection of all their releases during the years for this occasion.

Members: St0rmfr0nt, Shine, RHX, Nimbus

It took an additional 10 months, but in the end Bacchus and Rowdy stayed true to their promise of correcting and improving on their flawed crack of Return of Heracles, which they originally released in the 2015 cracking competition. So, in early February we were offered their final and megatrained version of the game!

It seems like Bacchus got bitten by the cracking bug, as he later released a version of the old game Shark. This was mostly a test subject to complete his tool-chain for future releases, though.

According to the scroller in the release, Bacchus also indicated that hedning changed his handle to hending, but the Attitude staff were unable to verify this before going into print. ;) Interestingly the original of Shark was supplied by their old member Flood (also known as one of the members of the Swedish synth-band S.P.O.C.K.).

Winks aka Wiklund won the music compo at Revision 2016 with his Club Revision, and also Reed made a comeback after six years of silence with his Gigatron Assault which struck gold in the mixed music competition at Simulaatio 7.

At Gubbdata, Rowdy and Bacchus were seen working on yet another crack. The title in question is a larger previously unreleased game, but we will not give more details than that, to avoid spoiling things for them. Also Avalon and Oxidy represented FLT at Gubbdata.

Demowise FLT again teamed up with Offence and Noice, ending up winning the mixed demo compo at Revision 2016 with their We are demo. No releases were made at Gubbdata 2016, but they did win the mixed demo competition at Edison, held at the same time as Gubbdata, with a demo called In memory of.

The production was fully made by Hollowman, except for the music which was made by Goto80 of HT. Cool to see Hollowman back in action again, we have been waiting for that to happen!

They also released the demo we/shades at Edison, which ended up on fifth place. This production was made by moh, Puterman, Hollowman, Vodka and Klegg of Panda Design.

On the member front BigFoot joined them as cracker while still staying in Breeze, Chorus and Resource as well. Dwangi returned to active state.

With 11 first releases since January, Genesis Project seems to be better off in Cracker Land compared to last year where they took around 15 first releases in total. We'll see if they will keep their new pace in the long run.

They also seem to keep a higher quality profile, releasing more new games, and also doing quality preservation releases of older games. The cooperation with TRIAD also continues, with the smash hit Hessian released in February as an example. Some nice first releases include titles as Spaceman Splorf, Speeding on the A 81, and Honey Bee.

On the demo side G*P won at SynchroNY 2016 with Mermaid's retro intro 1988 Pale Gold, but other than that there has been little action, except when it comes to music. A lot of tunes have been released at various parties and compos, including BCC Party #10 and Revision. Mermaid in particular has been very busy. Rumours has it that many members are occupied with their party Gubbdata as well as preparing for X later this year.

G*P released one tune at Edison, and no less than 10 productions at Gubbdata, where a bunch of G*P members were present as well!

At Gubbdata, Mermaid won the C64 PETSCII compo with her piece Glad Gubbe, while redcrab came in on second place with his Duelling Invaders. Also Xiny6581 grabbed a medal as he grabbed the second spot in the music compo with a tune called Substral Hyperwaves V.

However, it was in the demo compo that the slam-dunk occured! Genesis scored a well-earned gold medal with their demo Nothing but PETSCII, taking the crowd with storm. Coded by Norrland (formerly known as H Macaroni), with graphics from redcrab and with music by Stinsen, rumours say this demo took two years to complete. Well spent time, obviously!

There have been two members dropped lately, all of them being inactive for quite a while: swedish coders Nova and Opius. New members are Swedish musician Xiny6581 and sysop pewp, the latter responsible for the new G*P boards on various platforms.

Propaganda is certainly not dead, but is considered a long-term project since a complete overhaul of the magazine engine and editor is needed.

Meanwhile in real life (aka Facebook) Mermaid reacted strongly to a post by Antitrack, who was defining refugees as apes and subhumans.

A whole bunch of other sceners, including Morpheus, Hedning, Linus and Cruzer acknowledged that Antitrack has joined the conspiracy theorists and spends his time posting weird bigotry on the net. A sad fact, and naturally Mermaid dropped him from her friends list, as did many other sceners.

Hack n' Trade seem quite stuck in reverse polish notation land, with no less than 7 new versions of their programming suite DurexForth being released during 2016! Ranging from smaller bugfixes to improved versions, Mathman is fully set on bringing the scene the ultimate Forth experience...

AcidT* released two PETSCII screens for the mixed gfx compo at Gubbdata, one coming in at fifth place (Myopia 4 the Future) and the other on fourth place (Keys of Fury). Also at Gubbdata, Mathman released the util Movie Noperator V1.1.0, a PETSCII animation tool.

Frantic did not show up at Gubbdata this time around, but he has been seen cruising the boards.

Goto80 claims that Sixx/G*P has been sending him unwanted porn via the net. Most recently a disturbing animated wanking gif. Sounds like som kind of digital warfare...

Hitmen gave us two smaller productions during the year, first out was Tanz in den Mai by Groepaz and Seven. Then, at the webdesign conference Tellerrand in Germany, they released another onefiler, fittingly named Beyond Tellerrand. As it turns out, old Hitmen member Tyron is the organizer of Tellerrand, which explains why him and Cupid, Groepaz and Seven seem to have had a Hitmen meeting there as well.

Hoaxers seem to have been loosing momentum lately. BHF is usually a driving force of nature, so let's hope something is going on behind the scenes. Only two releases have made its way out so far during 2016, a music compo entry from Kribust for the Nonstandard Time Signature Compo, which scored place 8 out of 20 competing entries, and Joe's graphics entry S3C23TS which came in on 7th place att Gubbdata 2016.

With over 30 cracks released so far during 2016, no one can deny that Laxity is the king of quantity. The majority of the releases were put out first, while a few were intended mailreleases. Some titles worth mentioning are the nice Uridium clone Drugs from Markt und Technik, QWAK, CBM Asteroids and a sales version of Honey Bee from Psytronik. We do not know how the Laxity sales version of Honey Bee differ from the first release by G*P, though.

Speed can be a double-edged sword at times, and thus their first first-release in 2016, Rock Maze (reset edition) contained a crash bug, which was corrected in a subsequent v2.

More recently they battled TRIAD over the title Quod Init Exit. Again Laxity's first release contained crash bugs, so TRIAD put out what was thought to be the 100% version. However, there was a tiny charbug in two minor places in the TRIAD release, so Laxity nitpicked and countered with a 100% version of their own.

Amusingly, this Laxity version still crashed, and thus TRIAD released their second version of the game, which indeed proved to be 100% and also contained quite some trainers. It took Laxity another two versions to get a fully working mail release out the door. No denying that this was a tricky title to handle, though.

They also teamed up with Onslaught on a few occasions, giving us excellent titles like the extended edition of Tiger Claw and the interesting lost Demonware title Evil Garden.

Their headquarter Colosseum, operated by Warlock, was sadly shut down in the end of May due to hardware troubles. This excellent BBS will surely be missed!

Not wanting to be without a HQ, Laxity instead signed up on Reflections BBS together with Onslaught.

Reflections is operated by the Stablizer of Demonix and Longshot, who recently made a comeback to the scene. Reflections is thus shared between these four groups, and has already earned its place among the top boards.

A few legal productions made it out as well. DanDee is without doubt an excellent graphician, his Vote Evilbot ended up on sixth place at Revision 2016 (and probably deserved a higher ranking). Also new and neat logos for two fresh Laxity crackintros were produced by him, The Right Way To Grow and Floating Window.

Game Corner seem to be quite delayed, but we assume it will make it out sooner or later...

Members: Animalo, DanDee, Didi, Goat, O'Dog, Secret Man, Warlock

Headquarters: Colosseum - colosseum.c64bbs.org:6400 (BBS)

Mayday! released their first attempt at a trackmo in the end of February. Entitled The Mayday Show, the demo is a bit rough around the edges but still enjoyable to watch, and the PETSCII graphics featured is awesome! The production ended up on second place at BCC Party #10.

About a month later Overdocean, a demo/music collection containing classic tunes from Ocean musicians and remixes, won the demo compo at Forever 2016. In May they released a BBS intro for their board Fastline (which runs on an Amiga 4000), entitled Come to Fastline. The board is operated by Fix/Hokuto Force, and functions as HQ for Desire, HF, Laxity and Mayday!

No less than three new crack intros has been produced by TheRyk, RyFeeLuv, Bladay and an imitation of the classic FLT intro, entitled FairMayDayLight.

As for cracks, they first released CRX Race and also two somewhat different versions of QWAK were put out.

Memberwise they expanded the crew by including coder awsm (also a member of Vision), newcomer coder+cracker GI-Joe, musician R0ly and multi-talent Greyrat.

In the end of April, N0stalgia released their jewel take on Xenophobe, presented in both disk and easyflash format. S!R supplied, cracked, trained, bugfixed and onesided the game, and of course also included documentation.

This is exactly the quality we have come to expect from N0S. All in all, this is an awesome release.

Next up was Nightshade, another nice effort, this time handled by Tom-Cat. Both the colour- and the monochrome versions of the game included in the same file, trained, several bugfixes made and documentation provided.

Surprisingly, former N0S member Fungus attacked Tom-Cat and stated that he had not done any cracking on this title, but rather used 'someone elses' tool to crack the game. This was strongly denied by Tom-Cat, who in turn called Fungus the biggest idiot in the world.

As far as we know, Tom-Cat and Fungus have collaborated on some titles in the past, so the clash was unexpected. Neither side backed down, so we guess there will be no Christmas presents exchanged between the two in the foreseeable future!

In the beginning of June, an EF exclusive release came along. The two games Deja Vu and Uninvited in one compilation, coupled with documentation and walkthrough. Responsible were S!R and Erhan with some help from GRG and Tom-Cat.

Tom-Cat also released version 1.6 of his interactive disassembler for the 6510, entitled Regenerator.

In March freQvibez competed in the Nonstandard Time Signature music compo, and ended up on 12th place. As already mentioned they won the democompo at Revision 2016 with the nice production We Are Demo, together with Noice and FLT.

Alfatech coded a tribute intro for TRIAD, for their 30th anniversary, which is included on this very disk!

Memberwise, Conjuror joined up with them in late March. He also stays is Onslaught, but is considered an inactive member there.

In the end of February Onslaught released Captain Fizz V1, a whole other version of the game than the one we know since before. As usual dug up by Jazzcat and trained by Pugsy. A few days later we were also offered no less than two new commercial games from Psytronik; Super Carling the Spider and the basketball game Jam It!

As already reported under Laxity news, they released Tiger Claw (extended edition) and Evil Garden together.

About two weeks back another game made it out, the quite neat Kabura which in style resembles a bit to a NES game. It was supplied and translated by Almighty God, while Pugsy handled the rest of the job.

Apart from cracks, a few other things made it out as well. For instance, Cons won the mixed graphics compo at End of the World Party 2016 with a piece entitled Legion II. Also, at Gubbdata, Zzap69 ended up on 13th place in the music compo with Life of Leif, while grip reached tenth place in the graphics compo with Dichotomy Dissolving. They were both present at the party representing Onslaught, together with Macx.

Things might seem a little slow in the group at the moment, but we are not worried. Onslaught is a stable group, and we can surely expect more good things from them this year.

However, some of their resources are a bit tied up elsewhere at the moment. Algorithm is working on a solo-demo outside the group, and Enthusi is putting his time into the to-be commercial game Caren and the tangled tentacles.

Following his move to join Offence in March, Conjuror was moved to inactive status in Onslaught.

The first two releases (A storm is coming and The Evil 40) from Oxyron this year have already been mentioned elsewhere in this chapter as they were both coop-productions.

Two new versions of Bitbreaker's loadersystem with depacker, Bitfire, was released, the latest being version 0.6. Bitbreaker also contributed with two entries for the Spontaneous Sierpinski Triangle Funcompo, one weighing in at 92 bytes and the other one an anorectic 68 bytes!

At Gubbdata, Lman competed with the tune Robot Sensuality, which ended up on fifth place in the competition. Judging by the applause from the audience, it was very well recieved.

To our knowledge, no Oxyron member visited Gubbdata this time around, so the tune was sent as remote entry.

Our favourite pandas have been having a real slow 2016 so far - but the year is only halfway through, so let's hope for a strong second half! So far only five tunes have been released, though. SIDharta goes trauma by Qdor and Insomnia Run by Radiant, scoring place 18 and 13 respectively, at Revision 2016.

Fegolhuzz entry faired better, ending up on a respectable fourth place at the same party with his 8-bitburgers.

Klegg competed at Edison with a tune originally intended for a demo, named Bob's your uncle. We have no information on which place it ended up at, though.

At the same time at Gubbdata in Scania, Fegolhuzz went on to win the music compo there with his Nothing compares to EU.

Singular are working hard on organizing the next Arok party, which will be held between the 29th and 31st of July. They also have plans to release something at X, but nothing too serious, maybe a smaller demo though.

Hermit needed a longer pause and to relax a bit, so he has reduced his scene activity for now and has been moved to inactive status. He will still be active in the Sidrip music band, though.

Soci on the other hand is very active although he is supposed to be inactive, new tools and hardware projects are in the works from him, but these are still secret projects. He already released a few tools though, like View64 and new versions of FunkPaint and CFSfdisk.

Leon is without doubt the most active member of the group, having released no less than seven pieces of graphics of very high quality so far during the year. For instance, he won the mixed graphics compo at DiHalt 2016 Lite, came in on second place at Forever 2016 and again won at QB Party 2016.

Cargo is also doing his best to motivate the old Faces and Graffity members - who knows, there might be a comeback demo from them at Arok if all goes well!

TRIAD started out 2016 with Sailor releasing version 1.2 of his popular Spectacular Copy - Turbo to Disk tool.

Sailor also took care of Hessian, which was released in coop with our friends in G*P who had obtained the game beforehand. Quite a lot of work went into Hessian, but considering how great the game is it was surely worth the effort.

Meanwhile, Lynx trained a neat PET conversion called Slime, and some weeks later also handled the follow-up Slime Deluxe, with some assistance from Tao who fixed a bug in the original.

Their first release of Ring on a String from the RGCD Cartridge Game Development Competition in April caused some controversy. TRIAD released the game before the original was available for download and had it uploaded to the three first release approved boards. Excess released a version with one added trainer, which was not available on the boards within 24 hours from the initial TRIAD release. TRIAD explained that the reason for their version not having any trainer was quite simple - it did not make any sense to add a trainer to this type of game.

A heated discussion took place on the subject, not mainly between TRIAD and Excess who always had a good relationship, something that a disagreement on a single release could never change - but rather betweeen TRIAD and the staff behind Game Corner.

The view represented by TRIAD was backed by Propaganda The List, and the skirmisch ended by everyone involved (including the Vandalism News The List) agreeing that TRIAD should be awarded the first release, but that Excess should not get any re-relase deduction because of the rule being fuzzy.

Subsequently, it was decided to remove the rule of "training needed if necessary" for a release to count, mostly because the various release list staffs felt it was hard to interpret.

For TRIAD, points and first release or not has always been second priority. A good version of the game is what counts the most, but keeping quiet when the rules were so obviously misinterpreted was simply not an option. Not training a game needing trainers, or training a game not needing trainers is for us equally problematic. Needless to say, TRIAD were pleased with the outcome of the discussion.

Also in April, Sailor released another version of Spectacular Copy - Turbo to Disk 2.0. This version is re-written from scratch, utilizing fast I/O routines for 1541, 1581 and DolphinDos2 and many other features.

Then it was time to get a proper invite for Gubbdata 2016 out the door, together with G*P. Coded by Tao, with gfx by ilesj and music from MCH/G*P. Talking about Gubbdata, this party will be a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the birth of TRIAD and G*P, so both groups are involved in the organizing.

In June, Sailor again broke out of retirement to handle Quod Init Exit IIm. Details about this release have already been given in the Laxity section of this news chapter.

At Gubbdata in Lund this very weekend TRIAD was represented by Cash, Taper, bepp, Sailor, ilesj, Tao, iopop and King Fisher. Sadly old TRIAD founder Lucifer couldn't make it this time because of last minute job commitments. We started off the party on Friday by releasing a GTW, the early preview of an abandoned bomberman clone called Blaster Twins from Threshold Productions. This one was supplied and handled by Moloch.

So, what do you do when Gubbdata is less than three weeks away and your planned demo is nowhere near completion? Well, you panic and then decide to put the initial demo on hold, and instead start to work on something smaller for Gubbdata. This was what TRIAD did! Coding and fixing was performed all the way up until the very last minutes before handing it in, but the goal was reached and their compo-demo Monochrome could enter the competition! Monochrome was coded by iopop, icon and Tao, with graphics by Twoflower and music from Dalezy.

In addition to this, ilesj competed in the graphics competition with his new piece Cock Picture, which ended up on first place in the graphics compo and snatched the gold medal!

On Sunday, the last day of Gubbdata, a second GTW was first released when Spaceinvadaz Extra preview made it out, supplied by Taper and slammed by Lynx.

Memberwise, they gained a new member in late February when MtnBuffalo was recruited to work as a magazine editor and reinforce the Attitude staff.

An inactive TRIAD member Con contributed with a soundtrack for this very issue of Attitude.

In June Taper had a flooding in his basement but no Commodore hardware was harmed. 50-100 empty floppydisks did bite the dust, but that was all.

Hokuto Force has been quite active during 2016, and also released some very interesting stuff. For instance, they obtained two game previews of titles converted from the C16/Plus4 by Micro Projects. The conversions were never completed, but HF first released both titles to the public - Dorks Dilemma Preview +2 and Tycoon Tex Preview +2. Latest titles out from them were The Crown of Ariiance and Super Jumpkick preview, both released towards the end of June. In addition to this, a bunch of jewel cracks have been released as well.

They also produced three new crackintros, entitled Blue Mood, Movement Intro and Blazing intro. Also neat graphics and music, as well as some tools have made it out during the year. Many of the HF members have been involved in their recent streak of activity, so we will not do any namedropping this time.

However, HF has impressed us - from next issue of Attitude they will have their own section in the news chapter, a place well earned.

Software of Sweden released the anniversary intro SoS30 at Gubbdata, coded by Itch and with music by Dalezy/TRIAD. Sadly Itch could not attend Gubbdata as he is in the USA on a family vacation, but Ron was at the venue to represent! SoS also released a new game, Yatzy!

On June the 3rd 1987, Mahoney made a demo to celebrate his best friend Conan/Defiers birthday. Conan has sadly passed away, and this demo was found among his disks by his brother Yodelking who preserved the disk and finally released the demo to the public at Gubbdata 2016. A special occasion indeed.

No other than Perplex/Offence, ZZap69/Onslaught and Archmage/SHAPE teamed up as One Bit Wonder at Gubbdata and released a production with the same name, which ended up on fifth place in the demo compo!

Did you know that the lights in the restrooms at Gubbdata were totally fucked up? They turned off every five seconds so the whole restroom got pitch black. Then you had to make a move for the motion sensor to activate the lights again. Saving the environment sure - but shutting down every five seconds, forcing you to do some kind of pee-dance moves in front of the toilette bowl, which results in a slow-mo stroboscope effect is just plain silly! Gah!

Protovision was extended with a new graphician called Kwayne. They will soon release The Camp Caravan Edition, which is a ramped up version of the German only adventure game The Camp that was released in 2015's Forum64 game competition. The new version will be released in English as well as German and will feature slightly improved graphics, a few more rooms to explore and some fun bonus items in the package, for example custom printed toilet paper and a beer coacher fitting to the game.

Not only TRIAD, G*P and SoS celebrate 30 years on the scene during 2016, so does the pride of the Finnish scene, Byterapers. To honour this occasion, they will be throwing an invite-only party on the 1-4th of September. There will be competitions, live acts and general partying. If you feel like you should be invited, check out:

The documentary From Bedrooms to Billions: The Amiga Years is now out. The film has a running time of 2 hours 31 minutes and explores the influence of the Commodore Amiga and how it triggered a generation of developers to take video game development, music and publishing to a whole new level, which changed the video game industry forever.

Interviews include the creators of Populous, Secret of Monkey Island, Sensible World of Soccer, Defender of the Crown, Syndicate, Alien Breed, Wings, Shadow of the Beast, Turrican II, The First Samurai, Another World, Flashback and many many others. Let's hope they decide to make an equally extensive documentary about the Commodore 64 in the future as well.